Cubs, city ink 10-year deal to play ball until 2022

Friday

Dec 7, 2012 at 7:24 PM

It's official. The Daytona Cubs will be walloping baseballs around Jackie Robinson Ballpark through the end of 2022.

EILEEN ZAFFIRO-KEANSTAFF WRITER

DAYTONA BEACH — It's official. The Daytona Cubs will be walloping baseballs around Jackie Robinson Ballpark through the end of 2022. On Friday afternoon, Daytona Beach city commissioners voted unanimously to enter into a new 10-year lease with the minor league baseball team, an agreement that will allow the ball club to charge for parking for the first time and lay out a plan to tackle $1.25 million worth of improvements to the city-owned facility just off Beach Street. "It's unthinkable that the Cubs and Jackie Robinson Ballpark would not be synonymous," Kevin Kilian, chief operating officer for the Daytona Regional Chamber of Commerce, told city commissioners Friday. If the team and city hadn't been able to get past a few sticking points, it could have been the first time in 20 years that spring in Daytona wouldn't kick off with a new Cubs baseball season at the historic field on City Island. The Cubs' current eight-year lease with the city ends Dec. 31. "We finally reached a conclusion," said Cubs General Manager Brady Ballard, who has spent the past year hammering out a deal with the city. "We're excited to do the renovations." Now that the new lease with the Cubs' owner, Big Game Florida, is in place, the first phase of the 100-year-old park's overhaul can get under way Monday or Tuesday, Ballard said in an interview Friday. That first phase of work will include an expansion of the team's weight room, the installation of padded walls in the outfield, the renovation of the Cubs' office on site and the addition of more office space in a building across the street at 110 Orange Ave., Brady said. "We hope to be done by April 1," he said, but noted the delays in finalizing the contract might make that goal unreachable now. The second phase, which will start in the fall of 2013, will include the creation of a new gate entrance on the east side of the park and an overhaul of restrooms and the concession area, he said. The final holdup with the contract had to do with the idea to start charging $2 or $3 per vehicle for parking in a few years. Because both city and county parking lots around Jackie Robinson Ballpark would be used, both city commissioners and County Council members had to agree on the proposal. The county owns the 300-plus parking spaces around the courthouse on City Island, and the city controls more than 230 spaces around the library on City Island, only some of which the Cubs will use. City commissioners unanimously OK'd the parking fee idea in early November, but it took until Thursday for the County Council to make a decision. The County Council said OK at its meeting Thursday, but the approval came with a requirement for the city and Cubs to handle all parking revenue. The deal that got finalized Friday is for the Cubs to hire people to collect parking fees, and for the Cubs to send that money to City Hall on a monthly basis. There are no plans to charge for parking in 2013, and the earliest those new fees would start would be 2014, Ballard said. When the new fees do begin, the city will send some of those parking revenues back to the baseball team to compensate them for their labor expenses for the parking fee collectors and for the $1.25 million in park improvements. The lease calls for the team and city to share the renovation costs. City funds for renovations are coming from a $300,000 grant from the Daytona Beach Racing & Recreational Facilities District and $350,000 from the city's Downtown Community Redevelopment Area fund. A city document released Friday said the city's investment will provide "sports entertainment to well over 1.2 million" Cubs fans over the next decade and eliminate the city's subsidy of the ball team after 2013. City officials say their subsidy in 2004 was nearly $253,000, and that the amount did gradually drop to just under $111,000 by last year. The total public subsidy to baseball at the park over the course of the current eight-year lease has been $1.43 million, according to city records.

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